Car Thing. Spotify’s new smart player designed for your drive | Hacker News Reader

Car Thing. Spotify’s new smart player designed for your drive

carthing.spotify.com

52 pointsuptown23 comments

I imagine the amount of cars on the road without integrated OSes represents much higher than those with.

This seems like an affordable way for Spotify to gather more subscribers or "lock" in those who already use Spotify by offering more incentive (as this is only for Premium customers)

As someone who drives a vehicle from 2013, I actually wouldn't mind having this! The big knob is nice :)

If we're actually considering the final non-promo price of $70 it feels like a pretty awful deal.

Depending on the car $100-$200 will get you a cheap Android headunit with Carplay emulation, which gives you a similar interface and everything else Carplay does.

This feels like a fun experiment, which is fine, but I don't think it makes sense as a normal product

At first I questioned whether this was an April Fools joke....

TL;DR: Spotify made a sleek new gadget that presents a nice Spotify interface designed for mounting on a dashboard. It connects to your phone and uses its data plan. No maps or navigation. Just Spotify.

My reaction is that this isn't helpful for anyone who has a newer car that likely can connect to a phone via CarPlay, Android Auto, or Mirrorlink. And for those who don't, the device is sorely missing navigation. If my car couldn't connect to my phone, I'd be looking for a $20 plastic thing to mount my phone to my dash so I could get nav + music.

I see dedicated devices as end-runs around data gathering restrictions on apps. (I'm not sure how this specific device works)

For example, a cellular kindle can do anything.

It uses the phone's Spotify app to access the Internet, so I would imagine the restrictions from app stores still apply.

It could easily contain its own GPS though and circumvent OS location permissions.

hot take is this came from some internal expectation that cars would more and more be using Apple/Android car OSes and so spotify app would be installed by users naturally -- but that hasn't panned out, so they have to create their own hardware to run the spotfiy app now. Gotta get that lockin from customers, on as many avenues as possible.

That's an iPod with a data plan.

Not even, it's a BT controller for one app! That said, I do like the big knob, it's maddening how bad the physical controls (if there even are any) can be in modern cars.

I guess if you never leave certain large cities it might work. But it's definitely Epic Fail for the remaining 90% of roads in the USA.

This reality is why I still have an iPod in my car.

Spotify (Premium) lets you cache your library for offline play.

This could be great if they had a version that could be installed into the standard stereo slot that many cars have. (Is that still a thing?)

If it's anything like their carplay integration it'll be so stuttery and broken as to be dangerous to use while driving.

Awesome - my car entertainment system does not have spotify integration so I am stuck using my android phone and it sucks.

Ahh, the natural progression of every tech company ever. Make everything a platform, an aggregator. Collect rent.

Hardware looks awesome. Hope it's jail breakable. A nice big nob, other buttons, bt and screen. Cool

Wondering how many car dashboards have place for a phone _plus_ this Spotify device.

The image implies it's able to hook into an AC vent

Doesn't work for every car, but works often enough that there are hundreds of products out there that do the same

I think this is a spotify labs type of thing

How does it connect to the cars speakers?

So, Spotify is noticing that with streaming music every extra customer costs them extra money (in royalty payments). If you don’t turn a profit with 100.000 users, you won’t with 10.000.000 or 100.000.000 either.

So now they are trying to emulate Apple: stream music at a loss, but use that service to sell devices with healthy profit margins.

Except instead of a class leading technical marvel smartphone they bring out a...thing? For in your car? That already has Bluetooth?

They are offering it for just the price of shipping right now, so profiting on the hardware doesn't seem like it's the strategy.

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